The Role of Social Media Motivation in College Students’ Social Media Behaviors and Adjustment

Abstract

As young adults continue to be the largest reported age group on social media (Auxier & Anderson, 2021), the need to understand why they go online and what they do online increases to better explain the associated ramifications found with social media use. No longer does general social media time lead to negative outcomes; rather, these outcomes have links to the types of behaviors online and the reasons for going online (Dumas et al., 2020; Nesi et al., 2021). This dissertation explores how college students’ social media behaviors, specifically like-seeking behaviors (Dumas et al., 2017), have changed, their possible motivations for going online, and if their motivations moderate the relationship between like-seeking behaviors and resulting behaviors (i.e., depressive symptoms, risky behaviors, etc.). All three studies utilize a college sample and self-report measures. Study 1 explores and confirms how new behaviors added to the original like-seeking scale fit by running exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Study 2 examines if popularity serves as a possible motivation for engagement in like-seeking behaviors by using an experimental manipulation. Study 3 explores how motivations (popularity, social comparison, and feedback-seeking), behaviors, and emotional and behavioral adjustment (depression, body image satisfaction, and risky behaviors) are related. Results suggest that the original like-seeking scale needs to be updated, popularity is a motivation for like-seeking behaviors even in young adults, and motivations for being online are more strongly related to emotional adjustment than the actual behaviors themselves.